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In 2017, the Terengganu Chinese Peranakan Association (TCPA) withdrew its participation in the 4th Annual Terengganu Peranakan Festival (TPF) organised by the Terengganu Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry (TCCCI) because of a dispute over the combined term “Mek Awang”. To TCPA members, Mek Awang is a derogatory term, which the Malays used to refer to someone as being “soft”, effeminate, or a cross-dresser. However, TCCCI has appropriated the term Mek Awang and used it as a brand name to promote the festival, and to highlight the “uniqueness” of the Terengganu Peranakan Chinese community. This case is an example of how local cultural terms or practices have been readapted to suit tourism interests. Tourism is often accused of reinventing culture for capital ventures. Consequently, many academics and social critics have come to regard official national heritage sites and heritage tourism with scepticism and disdain. Combining ethnographic data from our in-depth interviews with the Terengganu Peranakan Chinese and our participant observation during the festival, we argue that the dispute over Mek Awang is not only a simple change in reference, but is also an indication of a deeper contemporary global process that affects ethnic minorities and their identities. We conclude that various attempts to commodify the peranakan experiences and culture in Terengganu as well as the intention to place the peranakan as a marketable heritage in Chinatown can be interpreted as attempts to replace a heterogeneous community with a homogeneous, uniform, genetic and identifiable ethnic category with a Peranakan1 (with capital “P”) identity.

This article aims to analyze how fading the Chinese diaspora culture from Lasem Chinatown over several generations. Previous studies show that Chinese descent's identity and orientation disappeared due to assimilation with the local community during the new order. In fact, there was a tendency for them not to show their Chinese identity from the beginning. This did not pay enough attention to the local context, social situation, and the cultural heritage of Chinese descent between generation s . This case study is conducted by interviews, observation, and document study. The data is analyzed using the NVivo Program. Baubock & Faist’s new concept of diaspora is used to review the phenomenon of the spread of Chinese descent from Lasem Chinatown. This research shows that the Indonesian Chinese people in Lasem tend to refer to themselves as 'Indonesian Chinese Peranakan and are increasingly detached from their identity relationship with their referent origin, China. Their Chinese identity is starting to fade since Chinese cultural heritage through religious rituals has been largely abandoned. Young Chinese children scattered out of Lasem Chinatown and lost their Chinese identity. The novelty in this research is that the assimilation and integration of Peranakan Chinese into local society are precisely related to the acceptance of the Lasem community, instead of Chinese culture's fading. Keywords: Chinese, Descent, Diaspora, Discontinuity, Dispersed

Responding to a recent call for interdisciplinary research into ‘night studies’, the present study attempts to put the nighttime at the centre of the sociolinguistic enquiry, seeking to explore how...

This article historicizes and links the ways in which ethnically segregated neighborhoods are born and die in American cities. Based on a historical ethnography of five Chinatowns in Los Angeles from 1850 to 1950, I highlight Chinese residents’ agency in both the birth and death of their own neighborhoods through a process called neighborhood architomy. Chinese residents split off new neighborhoods from dying neighborhoods while maintaining their institutions and memories, showing how neighborhood death and birth are intimately intertwined. To understand either process fully, we must treat neighborhoods and their residents as sociological and historical agents at both the birth and death of neighborhoods.

The British Columbia Chinese community struggled against political and economic racism and discrimination in the first half of the twentieth century. This study focuses on four festive civic celebrations in the period 1896-1936 when Vancouver’s Chinese Canadians employed traditional Chinese culture to assert their place as a legitimate component of the city’s social fabric. They joined official Vancouver in greeting China’s most respected statesman in 1896; participated in civic celebrations for visiting members of Britain’s royal family in 1901 and 1912; and organized one of the most successful aspects of Vancouver’s 1936 fiftieth anniversary celebrations, a four-week “Chinese Carnival.” Voices in the “white” community during the same period steadily but slowly articulated increased levels of acceptance of the Chinese presence. Changes in the popular journalistic portrayal of Chinese people reveal a gradual lessening of racist tropes and stereotypes. Finally, an English-language pamphlet produced in the Chinese community for the carnival provides a glimpse of how Canadian-born Chinese Canadians themselves were forging an increasingly North American identity, undermining arguments about their “inability” to adapt to Canadian cultural values., La communauté chinoise de la Colombie-Britannique a lutté contre le racisme et la discrimination politique et économique dans la première moitié du XXe siècle. Cette étude se concentre sur quatre célébrations civiques qui ont eu lieu entre 1896 et 1936, lorsque les Canadiens d’origine chinoise de Vancouver ont utilisé la culture chinoise traditionnelle pour affirmer leur place en tant que composante légitime du tissu social de la ville. Ils se sont joints au Vancouver officiel pour saluer l’homme d’État le plus respecté de la Chine en 1896, ont participé aux célébrations civiques pour les membres de la famille royale britannique en visite en 1901 et 1912, et ont organisé l’un des aspects les plus réussis des célébrations du cinquantième anniversaire de Vancouver en 1936, un « carnaval chinois » de quatre semaines. Durant cette même période, certains membres de la communauté « blanche » ont progressivement mais lentement exprimé leur approbation croissante envers la présence chinoise. Les changements dans la représentation journalistique populaire des Chinois révèlent une diminution progressive des tropes et des stéréotypes racistes. Enfin, une brochure en anglais produite par la communauté chinoise pour le carnaval donne un aperçu de la façon dont les Canadiens d’origine chinoise se forgeaient eux-mêmes une identité de plus en plus nordaméricaine, allant ainsi à l’encontre des arguments concernant leur « incapacité » à s’adapter aux valeurs culturelles canadiennes.

Boston’s history has been defined by successive waves of immigration, which have played a key role in shaping the city’s rich and complex urban cultural mosaic. Throughout the last 150 years, Bosto...

This paper argues that the routine development of Chinatowns has, in many ways, disjointed them from specific locations and into a space in the abstract. The average Chinatown frequently highlights generic ethnic symbols and products, rather than the exclusion and specific migrations that made historic Chinese enclaves possible. Approaching Singapore Chinatown as a case study, I draw upon interview and survey data to demonstrate how abstract space plays an important role in residents’ and tourists’ interpretations of Chinatown. Singapore Chinatown has undeniable connections to Singaporean Chinese heritage. However, tourists often treat it as a standardized space, framed according to their knowledge of Chinatowns in general. This framework of generic space may explain why tourists authenticate even the most contentious redevelopments that have been criticized by local groups. Chinatowns’ entanglement with globalization generates this dislocating phenomenon. I aim to further distinguish Chinatowns from ethnic enclaves as a dynamic space, where meaning is transformed by the designs and narratives projected by urban planners not just in one location, but globally. Delineating Chinatowns as unique ethnic places can benefit their role as attractions and vehicles of heritage and cultural representation.

The Bubonic Plague outbreak that wormed its way through San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1900 tells a story of prejudice guiding health policy, resulting in enormous suffering for much of its Chinese population. This article seeks to discuss the potential for hidden “prejudice” should Artificial Intelligence (AI) gain a dominant foothold in healthcare systems. Using a toy model, this piece explores potential future outcomes, should AI continue to develop without bound. Where potential dangers may lurk will be discussed, so that the full benefits AI has to offer can be reaped whilst avoiding the pitfalls. The model is produced using the computer programming language MATLAB and offers visual representations of potential outcomes. Interwoven with these potential outcomes are numerous historical models for problems caused by prejudice and recent issues in AI systems, from police prediction and facial recognition software to recruitment tools. Therefore, this research’s novel angle, of using historical precedents to model and discuss potential futures, offers a unique contribution. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00146-020-01120-w.

Semarang Chinatown area is one of the historical sites of Ancient Semarang Heritage City where there are cultural relics in store. Consisting of, viz.: architecture, food, stories, and environment that’s prominent with a Chinese family style atmosphere. Ironically, numerous cultural assets contained in the Semarang Chinatown Area are less celebrated unlike Semawis Night Market since people envision the area Semarang Chinatown only has it as its prime and foremost attraction. People's awareness to to other cultural and historical assets is immensely minimal. Therefore, through this Final Project the writer has chosen to fathom this issue and to come up with a solution. By establishing a brand new and fresh visual identity, the author wishes to be able to introduce Semarang Chinatown Area as an integrated cultural historic area to a wider-reaching audience to array a large selection of richness of philosophy, culture, and value that will not only enrich the knowledge of visitors but also to entertain them with some aesthetic pleasure.

Who holds the right to decide what gets remembered? Conversely, the right to forget? The interior architecture installation, Memory in Suspension, exhibited in Toronto’s Chinatown West as part of Museum of Toronto’s 2020 Intersections Festival at Cecil Community Centre, combines new and old technologies to tell the forgotten stories, wilful omissions, and accumulation of silences that exist beyond Toronto’s official heritage definition of its Chinatown neighbourhoods. Foregrounding the lack of records and archival materials available, Memory in Suspension develops an alternative approach to heritage reconstruction when confronted with a historically significant interior which has no architectural records or documentation. By unearthing the unrecorded histories of the first Chinese owned business in Toronto, Sam Ching & Co. Chinese Laundry, we explore what marginalised communities have known for some time—namely, all that is recorded is not necessarily all that is, and what is remembered extends far beyond what is recorded. Through interior architecture, Chinatown Lost and Found asks what we choose to remember and which tools and technologies keep those memories alive. This article explores how interior architecture can create a dialogue between official history and the associative nature of lived experience. Learning from these productive tensions, we suggest how interior architecture can use old and new archival technologies to empower community stakeholders to safeguard the future heritage(s) of Toronto’s Chinatowns. In particular, this article links 3D scanning technologies to community memory and marginalisation to pursue a dynamic and reversal-based interior architecture approach that critically positions how subjects inhabit, constitute and are constituted by the spaces in which they find themselves. In doing so, this article offers a more holistic approach and account of the instability of space and time in relation to memory and heritage for interior architectural practice.

The Hong Luck Kung Fu Club has been a fixture of Toronto’s Chinatown for over fifty years. Its curriculum includes not only self-defence skills, but also percussion music for accompanying martial arts demonstrations and lion dancing. Hong Luck’s blurred genre is a tool for preserving, transmitting, and promoting culture. At the same time, practitioners negotiate their identities in diverse ways. I thus interpret kung fu as a flexible, embodied practice whose purview extends beyond physical combat. Based on fieldwork at Hong Luck, this article uses cognitive semantics and phenomenology to demonstrate that kung fu, lion dance, and percussion help (re)construct Chinese identities emergently and strategically., Le club de kung-fu Hong Luck est une institution phare du quartier chinois de Toronto depuis plus de cinquante ans. Son programme inclut non seulement des cours d’auto-défense, mais également des cours de percussion pour l’accompagnement des démonstrations d’arts martiaux et de danse du lion. Le style fluide du club Hong Luck est un outil important dans la préservation, la transmission, et la promotion d’un patrimoine culturel. Les membres y négocient simultanément leurs identités de différentes façons. J’interprète donc le kung-fu comme une pratique flexible et dont la portée dépasse le combat physique. À partir d’une enquête de terrain au club Hong Luck, cet article emprunte à la sémantique cognitive et à la phénoménologie afin de montrer que le kung-fu, la danse du lion, et la musique de percussion contribuent à (re)construire les identités chinoises dans leurs aspects émergents et stratégiques.

Los Angeles Chinatown is one of the oldest North American urban Chinatowns and experiencing changes that are redefining the neighborhood. Yet, not all community leaders label these changes as gentrification that directly displaces the community. This article examines how community leaders representing business, residential, and cultural interests engage in the politics of placemaking through their narratives of a new development, Blossom Plaza. Community leaders do not always view gentrification as a primary direct displacement, and instead emphasize how a secondary and symbolic displacement is happening historically, physically, economically, and politically in Chinatown. However, they also vary in whether they see these changes as ultimately reshaping the neighborhood to maintain its unique identity, which is linked to how they envision Chinatown as an ethnic space. The findings highlight the importance of considering symbolic displacement in gentrification studies about historic ethnic enclaves.

“No new jails! Schools, not jails!” On 6 October 2019, I stood on the sidewalk in New York City’s Chinatown as a crowd of activist friends and neighbors chanted these slogans and marched in the str...

Tiny though it is, The Hague’s Chinatown is clearly presented as such, with Chinese lanterns, municipal street signage in Chinese characters, and sayings in Classical Chinese lining the streets. Do...

The current study reports a quantitative investigation of the linguistic landscape (LL) in Singapore’s Chinatown. The database of the study comprises a total of 831 instances of signs in the form of photographs that were collected in Chinatown. The study finds that English dominates the LL while Mandarin Chinese is ranked as the second frequently used language. The study also identifies significant differences in LL features between top-down and bottom-up signs. Specifically, these differences include what languages are used; monolingual, bilingual and multilingual compositions; code preference; and forms of Chinese scripts. The present study suggests that English now dominates the linguistic landscape of Chinatown. Even though many scholars have described the sociolinguistic situation in Singapore as being ‘English-knowing’, the data shows a shift towards being ‘English-dominant’, suggesting a gradual but sustained dilution of its multilingual ethos. The study also complicates our understanding of the dominance of English in multilingual societies such as Singapore, where a competing dominant language (Mandarin Chinese) may be seen to continue to exert considerable influence on the dynamics of English-dominant language use but, at the same time, whose main function is shifting towards the symbolic rather than communicative.

Chinatowns around the world have been much studied in the linguistic landscape literature. The bulk of this research has focused on Western enclaves resulting from the Chinese diaspora of the Nineteenth Century, which share certain semiotic characteristics and histories. Less research has been conducted on Chinatowns in the East or on newly emerging Chinese enclaves. This study, framed by Lefebvre’s Production of Space, fills a gap by investigating a newly emerging Chinatown in Bangkok, in contrast to that city’s original Chinatown of Yaowarat, and to those of the nineteenth century diaspora. In asking the question, ‘what constitutes an authentic Chinatown, and in whose eyes’, it draws on data from field trips, photographs, interviews, questionnaires, focus group and documents to highlight how this neighbourhood differs in important ways from Yaowarat and how both are distinct from diasporic Chinatowns and from more recent Chinese enclaves. The study re-examines the notion of authenticity as applied to Chinatowns and identifies a number of distinct discourses revealing opposing conceptions of authenticity.

In the early twentieth century, Chinatowns in the West were ghettoes for Chinese immigrants who were marginalized and considered ‘other’ by the dominant society. In Western eyes, these areas were the no-go zones of the Oriental ‘other’. Now, more than a hundred years later, traditional Chinatowns still exist in some cities but their meaning and role has been transformed, while in other cities entirely new Chinatowns have emerged. This article discusses how Chinatowns today are increasingly contested sites where older diasporic understandings of Chineseness are unsettled by newer, neoliberal interpretations, dominated by the pull of China's new-found economic might. In particular, the so-called ‘rise of China’ has spawned a globalization of the idea of ‘Chinatown’ itself, with its actual uptake in urban development projects the world over, or a backlash against it, determined by varying perceptions of China's global ascendancy as an amalgam of threat and opportunity.

Chinatowns are heritage spaces that are historically and geographically specific. Chinatowns are commonly leveraged as heritage attractions in tourism. In this paper, we used data from semi-structu...

Bangkok’s Chinatown is undergoing rapid change instigated by the city’s expanding metro lines that see old buildings are demolished and old tenants evicted. This paper investigates two Chinatown ne...

In recent years opera studies have taken a distinctly global and migratory turn: Nancy Rao'sChinatown Opera Theateris a notable example. Rao's book sheds new light on the art form's transpacific networks, Cantonese immigrant communities and their highly racialised experience of everyday entertainment in early twentieth-century America, thereby ‘strip[ping] the veneer of exoticism from [southern] Chinese [i.e., Cantonese] opera, placing it firmly within the bounds of American music and a profoundly American experience’. Still more illuminating is Rao's focus on the Chinatown theatre companies, their contracting of touring performers and their role in transoceanic commerce. Woven into the book is an intimately connected narrative of Cantonese opera in the 1920s, encompassing San Francisco, Vancouver, New York, Honolulu and (to a lesser extent) Havana. The selection of these locations is no coincidence, given their significance in the interwar years as port cities linked within imperial steamship networks, amidst the part-conflicting, part-intersecting agenda of dominant and emergent empires (for instance, Japan and the United States, in the case of the latter).

The present article will shed light on the settlement and demographic pattern of the Chinese community living in Calcutta over more than 200 years. The Calcutta Chinese settlement was one of the oldest if it is compared with the other settlements of them in other parts of South Asia. It also intends to focus on their arrival and the reasons behind their migration. The present article will also indicate the routes of migration and the evolution of their settlement in and around Calcutta.

I have known Ron Grele since his early support for the New York Chinatown History Project in 1979. I had written a proposal to the New Jersey Historical Commission, where Ron was research director,...

This article examines the semiotic landscape of the Chinatown in Incheon, South Korea. Using the geosemiotic framework as a heuristic guide, we analyze how the spectacle of Chinatown is constituted through spatial, linguistic, semiotic, and material resources, and find that the unordinariness of the place is contingent on and emerges through its juxtaposition with ordinary space, practice, and language use. We suggest this apparent paradox can be understood through the process of scaling, during which signs and practices that might have been considered quotidian become monumentalised and ritualised when they are transported across timescales and spatial scales. Incheon's Chinatown then affords an opportunity to understand the semiotic and material production of ‘unordinariness’ through ‘ordinariness’. These collective spatiotemporal disjunctures or juxtapositions reveal unexpected but nonetheless crucial intersections among language, semiotics, and nationness.

This essay adopts and adapts memory work, as developed by Annette Kuhn, as a method to search for the author's grandmother in Chinese American feminist film history. Foregrounding a trans-feminist perspective that moves across and between nations and film cultures, it introduces readers to a relatively unknown “orphan” documentary film, Forever Chinatown (1960). For the author and her family, the film carries with it a history of trauma that shapes what is remembered about it. Drawing on work in feminist film studies, particularly the notion of an archive of feelings, the essay blends life writing, theory, and visual-textual analysis to both allow the author to write her way into the film and trace her grandmother's presence in and labor on the film.

This chapter investigates the family history of the Xies and their migration experience. Born in Foshan, Guangdong province in China, Xie Tian decided to follow the seniors in his villages in China to move to Japan because of the better job opportunities the country offered. With his strong intention to return to his hometown Guangdong one day, he worked hard to make a fortune so he could open a Chinese restaurant as he wished. Nevertheless, he did not forget about his hometown in Guangdong province. Xie Tian, along with two village seniors from Guangdong province, maintained and promoted Cantonese culture in the early Yokohama Chinatown because they believed that someday they would return to China, perhaps with their family members; thus, upholding their Cantonese identity was essential for preparing their return to China. Chapter Four reveals the family story about the inheritance of a Chinese restaurant as well as local culture from father to the son in Yokohama Chinatown.

The diversity of ethnic groups in Indonesia has been one of the basic factors of the growth of identity in a settlement. Ethnic Chinese has been one of the minority ethnic groups that have become a part of that diversity, after migrating from China and have settled down in Indonesia from the early century (around 1st century B.C. according to Melalatoa [1]), thus making the name Chinatown known as the settlement whereas ethnic Chinese (now Chinese-Indonesian) lived. One of the biggest Chinatown in Indonesia, Glodok area had the identity known as a trading area managed by Chinese-Indonesian from the colonial era until now, and has become a very iconic place in Jakarta for the characteristics as a Chinatown. Glodok that was formed in the colonial era became the place where Chinese identity and Dutch identity interact, and then followed by the interaction with local ethnic groups identities in the following era. Advancement in architecture that was developed in those times became the very uniqueness that makes Glodok distinctive in Jakarta. In that phase, the settlement grows in response to the society and environment growth, especially in times of modernization and new technology. In this case, does the Glodok settlement still maintain its identity in the visualization of the settlement? Or the identity itself has already succumbed through the intense modernization and rapid changing in the environment? This paper aims to identify those changes of the settlement in response to the growing environment, especially in Indonesia whereas the country has a tropical climate that affects the use of building materials in the urban space of Glodok. The methods used to obtain the data needed are literature research on the development of Glodok throughout the history and observation on the growth through the documentation of both the past and the present of the Glodok settlement, and its growth in the aspect of architecture. Therefore, knowing that Glodok does have changes in the terms of settlement, the form and facades of building, the materials used, along with the identity growth.

This chapter examines the historical roles of the Cantonese migrants in Yokohama Chinatown. The Cantonese migrants arrived in Yokohama in the 1860s. They organized the early overseas Chinese community in Yokohama, which later became the Yokohama Chinatown. With their efforts in maintaining the local Cantonese culture in Japan, the Cantonese migrants have established hometown organizations, organized local folk cultural activities, and educational services, which allowed them to become the most dynamic hometown group in the Chinatown. This chapter lists the developmental process of the Cantonese migrants in overseas Chinese history.

This chapter continues the conversation of the inheritance issue of local religious culture in Yokohama Chinatown. The Chinese temples in Yokohama Chinatown, including the Temple of Guandi, are constructed with the leadership of Cantonese migrants in the community. Xie Tien and Xie Chengfa are both active participants in religious affairs since both of them were in charge of lion dance teams in the Chinatown. Whenever there are religious festivals, such as the births of Guandi and Mazu, the Xie father and son work day and night in lion dance practices with the younger generations. By investigating over 60 years of participation in the religious affairs of the Xies, this chapter demonstrates how Cantonese religious culture passes from generation to generation. From restaurant owner to the management position of the temple, and from lion dance performance to local identity transmission, the Xie family’s contributions to the community are not limited to internal affairs in the overseas Chinese community, but they establish a communication channel for the new overseas Chinese as well as the Japanese from the host society.

The central focus of this chapter is on Lum’s own artistic practice, which addresses the evolution of Chinese heritage within North American communities. As a photographer, Lum maps immigration patterns of first and second generation Chinese Canadians and Americans. His images document the way cultural identity is expressed in architecture, which in turn reveals a sense of place for the Chinese community. The chapter will include an analysis of a photographic series that Lum has been working on over the last several years entitled: “Tong Yan Gaai” or Chinatown in Cantonese. Tong Yan Gaai is a journey taken across America and Canada on a path that was built by Chinese immigrants. Utilizing a large format camera, Lum searches for clusters of communities that over time have built Chinatowns for the purpose of integration and growth. His aim is to focus and direct the attention towards the functionality of the Chinatown and explore the generational context of how the “Chinese” identity is expressed in these structural enclaves. The work documents the memory and explores the future of the Chinese community in Canada and the United States.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the residents’ perception towards the Chinese cultural attraction as an icon of cultural heritage tourism in Manado city. Manado is a predominantly Christian community and dominated by indigenous Minahasa tribes. But, now the city is populated by various inhabitants such as Sangir, Gorontalo, Maluku, and even foreign immigrants such as China and Arab migrating since the Dutch colonial era. Of the various communities that exist, practically only the Chinese community that still maintains its rituals amid strong advances in the tourism industry, this cultural practice can become an icon for cultural tourism. However, can the cultural ritual be accepted as an icon of Manado cultural tourism? This research was in the form of a descriptive qualitative approach. The instruments of data collection were questionnaires and field observations. Questionnaires were distributed to 325 respondents spread in Manado. Empirical results showed that every ritual attraction of Chinese Culture had always been awaited and an interesting spectacle for the people of Manado since the people of Chinese descent domiciled in Manado City. These findings could also provide recommendations for policymakers in setting annual tourist agendas as well as providing legal certainty for this region of Chinatown with various attractions as a cultural heritage area.

The phrase “public library” implies an institution that is open, accessible, and available to all. But who and what determines this entity known as the “public?” The project described in this essay offers a striking example of a community in Boston that came to be an “unpublic” for the city’s library services, with the closing in 1956 of the city’s Chinatown branch. But there is another story here as well: one of sustained neighborhood resistance to fallacious assumptions about the Chinese community as a “readership.” This local activism persisted for decades and inspired an exhibition—titled “These Words”—in 2016 that celebrated a century of the neighborhood’s print, publishing, and reading activities. Through large window panels, displayed in buildings on two widely-traveled streets, digitized material from the Chinese Historical Society created installations that challenged these exclusionary narratives. In the winter of 2018, after an absence of over six decades, a Chinatown branch reopened and is now a widely-used neighborhood resource. The specifics of how this project developed and its results will be considered, alongside a broader discussion of the complexities and potential of the use of strategies from humanities practices to both reveal the edges and to expand what a constitutes a “public.”

American suffrage history is dominated by white suffragettes; however, this essay aims to bring to light another vibrant dimension of the American women’s suffrage movement. Mabel Ping-Hua Lee turned tides when she marched horseback at a women’s suffrage parade at the age of sixteen, and further entrenched herself as a prominent Asian-American suffragette as she continued to fight for women’s suffrage throughout her lifetime, although the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred her and all Chinese people from voting or obtaining citizenship until the act was repealed in 1943. This article explores many dimensions of Mabel through several of her primary environmental and personal influences, from Guangzhou, China to New York City’s Chinatown, which all shaped her into an admirable, and selfless social justice advocate that claims an unforgettable chapter in American and Asian-American political history.

A recurring theme in Canadian diaspora literature is the problematization of cultural identity in the children of immigrants as they navigate between Western influences and their cultural heritage. My paper examines the different portrayals of second generation Chineseness in SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe (1990) and Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony (1995) through close reading. Although both these texts depict diaspora-matured Chinese Canadians as incorporating Western values into Chinese tradition, the elder generation’s response to this hybridity is configured differently. Through opposing representations of second generation characters’ use of the English language, Lee depicts early Chinese-Canadian Vancouver as more accommodating to amalgamated culture, while Choy’s Chinatown is hostile to Western influence. Linguistic proficiency is central to the plot of Disappearing Moon Cafe, where “Westernized” Chinese youth are depicted as masters of the English language and Western politics. This enables them to fight against repressive laws and ultimately gains them the approval of the elders, whereas the same bilingualism and biculturalism is condemned as dangerous in The Jade Peony. My paper analyzes white xenophobia in each text as the root cause of this difference in treatment; in an era where anti-Chinese sentiment is again rising, it is valuable to be aware of the far-ranging impacts of this hostility.

This chapter discusses Arthur Purnell’s architectural practice in Melbourne after he returned to Australia in 1910. It looks at a number of buildings that he designed in Melbourne which were influenced by his ten years in China. Some were designed for Chinese clients; some contained Chinese-style elements; and some had Chinese names. This chapter also talks about Purnell’s off-again on-again marriage with his wife Jane. It refers to his partnerships with architects George Beaver in Melbourne and Claude Chambers and Max Fizelle in Sydney. And it discusses two public exhibitions and one student design project that were based on Purnell’s buildings in Canton and Melbourne.